Practical Advice for the

Spiritually Curious & Magically Inclined

I just did a follow-up reading for a wonderful client I’d met with last year. While things have changed for the better in several ways, she’s still facing the same bigger issues that were nagging her a year ago. I gave her some intuitive insights that made her laugh, and some suggestions for future action steps. She’s not at the place to move mountains yet, but she’s getting there, little by little.

It might take several years for her to be in the position she ultimately wants to be in. Sometimes just making things happen that we desperately want to have happen takes some warming up to. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up over it, but we can try making lists, focusing on our goals, and taking baby steps to get there.

Whenever I feel bad vibes or glum in general, laughter raises my energy immediately. Here’s a funny clip from a great Aussie show called Summer Heights High that always cracks me up. Chris Lilley, the male actor who plays catty high school girl Ja’mie King, just tickles my funny bone.

You might think this all has nothing to do with intuition and being psychic, but it does! Think about it: how can you loosen up or have any fun in life if you don’t find things that amuse you and make you giggle? And once you get into all this psychic stuff, you’ll find there’s a lot of humor to it; for as much as it can be different, mind-boggling, and amazing, it can also be really fun, nice, light, easy, and bright.So whenever I see videos I think are funny, I’m going to post them here, just for the hell of it.

Meditating and grounding are two of the things I’ve covered so far that make you more psychic. But here’s a simple one – Passion Flower!!

I don’t pluck the real flower and eat it, but you could, I suppose. I buy the supplement at Whole Foods, in pill or liquid form. It helps me sleep and it makes my dreams come true – for reals. The things I dream about when I take Passion Flower really do come true. It’s non-toxic and non-addictive.

This is a portrait I took of my cat, Aloysius. Doesn’t he look wise? He loves to help with readings (he knows which clients like cats). He sits in their laps and relaxes during the session as they pet him.

I did a consultation for a client today who has a big choice to make: taking a stressful job for big money, or following her dreams into the unknown, down a path that may or may not ensure wealth or success. It’s her choice to make. She’s incredibly intelligent, beautiful, and driven: to me, it seems that she can make anything happen. And yet, what she’s facing right now is a big, scary decision: the choice between comfort or adventure. Kind of selling out (for big money, though), or entering into a whole other world, a whole new job in a different field across the country. In our session, I just helped her see more clearly the choices she had, what each job would mean, what the people would be like, how she would feel, etc. Ultimately, the choice is hers. My job was to help with clarity, to help her clearly see what she’s choosing between.

As is often the case with readings, I faced a similar circumstance this week. I received an offer for a job that, for all intents and purposes, seemed fine, almost great. But something in my gut told me not to take it. My body was tense, upset. I couldn’t sleep. I felt resentful, angry, even. For me, the choice between following the status quo, taking another marketing-related job which I can do and which will pay me a decent enough salary, or…not. Or following my dreams, trusting myself to know what will work for me and what won’t. It was so hard for me to decide, but I finally chose to turn the offer down. And now, a whole new future awaits. Am I scared? Yes. Am I going to keep stressing about it? I hope not.

I was forced to meditate as a child, and I hated it, so I find it odd that I’m doing it now on a daily basis and finding that it’s helping me to be more intuitive. In fact, I don’t even like to say “meditate.” I’ve tried calling it “introspecting” and I think when I have kids I’ll just tell them that Mommy needs her “quiet time.” Which I’m sure I will.Anyway, the key to being a good psychic/intuitive/healer or anything along those lines is to meditate, and today I just want to say that my some of my favorite guided meditations are those by Sanaya Roman and Orin. Sanaya Roman has written some amazing books, too, like “Personal Power through Awareness” and “Living with Joy,” among others.I love her meditations because the music is calming and soothing and not cheesy, her voice is beautiful, and the meditations are clear, easy to follow, and very uplifting. There are free meditations on their website (click on the link above) as well as courses and mp3s and stuff for purchase. Anyone who’s walking the intuitive path should have Sanaya Roman and Orin’s books/meditations/teachings in her basket.

This weekend I went to an amazing workshop held by Debra Lynn Katz, author of “You are Psychic,” “Extraordinary Psychic,” and “Freeing the Genie Within.” She’s the best teacher in the world, and she helped me to get in touch with my intuition when I got started on this path several years ago. I wanted to attend this workshop to just re-connect, work on my skills, and meet more like-minded people. It’s like continuing education for professionals.If you’re interested in learning more about utilizing clairvoyance and other techniques to access your intuition, I highly recommend reading all of Debra’s books and taking one of her workshops or enrolling in her training program. You will be amazed. She shows you that it’s not “out there” or “weird,” it’s as normal as learning to read and write, do math, or ride a bike.

Being grounded probably comes naturally to this monkey, who lives wholly in the present moment of the earth and most likely doesn’t get caught up in thinking about the past, wondering about other ideas and people and places and movies and books and news in the present, or worrying about all kinds of things that may or may not happen in the future.

OK. The last few posts have been about me babbling on about my mundane life. I want to get back to psychic/intuitive basics and since GROUNDING is the first, here, again, is the little list of ways to get grounded:

…create a grounding cord in your imagination running from the base of your spine down into the center of the earth. Visualize the energy you don’t want leaving your body and falling down into the molten core hot lava burning hot center of the planet, where it is completely destroyed and re-generated or re-cycled by the earth for other things. I learned to do this technique from Debra Katz, one of the BEST psychic teachers in the universe.

…go dig around in the earth, or mud. Or put your hands into a pot of soil and just feel the earth around your fingers. Breathe it in. Sonia Choquette, one of my favorite intuitives, teaches this technique.

Sonia also says other ways to ground yourself are to:

…grab your keys and just hold them in your hand.…bake some bread or cookies or something. If baking bread, knead your hands into the dough.…go do some gardening.…get some exercise.

I do all these things, and I also

…pet my cats, or brush them…take a nice sea salt bath with essential oils…do my nails or get my nails done, do a facial and a clay masque …listen to music I like and sing really loud in my car…shop

This is the part of psychic/intuitive awareness that I can’t wrap my head around. Last week – not this past week, but the week before, my friend came to visit. I picked her up at the airport, and that night I dreamed that we were leaving the airport but turned around just in time to see a BIG RUSSIAN plane crash into the ground, while landing. It kind of hit the ground in a perpendicular way and we were shocked and horrified to witness it. In the dream, there was a press conference with official people talking about the tragedy. The dream had such an impact on me that I told her all about it the next morning, and vowed to keep an eye out for any possible Russian plane crashes.

I’m shocked and mystified and I just don’t get why I would dream about this over a week in advance. I dreamed about that big earthquake in Italy the same night it happened, and that confused me, too. I’ve had lots of other intuitive dreams, from the mundane to the not-so-mundane, but this plane crash thing was just so SPECIFIC – I mean come on. RUSSIAN. Crashed while approaching the airport. COME ON. This is insane.

I know that the time-space continuum isn’t quite what we understand it to be…but I am dying for an answer. It’s not like I could have prevented the plane crash, or like I know any of the high-ranking Polish diplomats who were on the plane, or like I could have warned anyone, it’s not like I knew what country the plane was flying through per se, just that it was Russian…so why, other than to make me think, and wonder, and get really confused and not have a definite answer.

Sometimes you just can’t sit still and try to meditate to get grounded – there’s just too much going on. I had an experience like that yesterday at the DMV. Psychic or not, I wasn’t expecting to have to take a new photo, because the person I spoke to on the phone just before I went down there told me I didn’t have to. So I was shocked when the angry and grumpy lady behind counter #2 (who already flustered me because she was in such a bad mood I could literally feel it, too) told me to go get in line for a picture. I looked like hell – I’d decided to run to the DMV before the gym, so I didn’t have makeup on and my hair was just thrown back in a ponytail. Now, I don’t let anyone take a picture of me unless I’m looking somewhat decent. And, in my book, decent hair and makeup are an absolute MUST for a picture I’m going to have to tote around in my wallet for years to come. I fought back tears and stood in line with the hundred other people there and waited for my mugshot. After it was taken, and I’m convinced I will look like hell, I went out to my car, turned the engine on, and was so flustered that I drove out of the entrance driveway. Smart move to make on the DMV lot, but at least I didn’t get pulled over for it.

To say I felt ungrounded was an understatement. I was already tired that morning, and now I was pissed off, dejected, irritated, and grumpy, to boot. It was awful. And so I turned the cd player on as loud as I could and listened to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” which is what I’m into right now. I then called a friend and told her the whole story. Just bitching about it to someone made me feel better. After that, I went to the gym and did a good cardio circuit. And guess what? That, for me, was grounding! It’s as simple as that.

Other easy ways you can ground yourself are by exercising, screaming into a pillow if you’re really angry, eating something good, taking a few deep breaths, or leaving the scene to take a walk around the block. Honestly, just doing whatever you need to do to feel better in that moment will work. Don’t stuff your feelings away or pretend they aren’t there…experience them, live them, and then do something that makes you feel like yourself again.

It may not sound profound, but grounding yourself is integral to feeling OK, and feeling OK is integral to working with your intuitive and psychic energies. Now, had I stopped for a second before even going to the DMV and checked in with my psychic side, I might have been better able to prepare myself for this whole incident. I could have thought – let me go to the gym FIRST, then come home and shower and do my hair and get dressed and put on makeup, because you never know who you’ll run into…but I didn’t. And I guess that’s the breaks: to err is human, psychic or not.

One of the first things you need to learn to be an effective psychic is to ground yourself. In fact, the word “grounded” is sneaking more and more into common parlance these days. I notice people commenting on how others are “grounded” and how they do or don’t feel “grounded” right now.

What is being grounded? Well, it’s kind of just being chill and relaxed, to be honest. It’s being centered in your body, and connected to the earth. Not being “out there” and “floaty” and stuff. It feels good to be grounded. You feel like you’re in the here and now, like you’re generally OK.

I didn’t realize this before, but being a sensitive type, I get ungrounded pretty easily. I get swept up in other people’s energies and get carried away by things. Overwhelmed. Here’s how I was trained to ground myself in a meditative way:

Take a few deep breaths, and let them out slowly. Imagine your root chakra, spinning at the base of your spine. Imagine that you have a thick, hollow cord, or hollow tree trunk, or whatever suits your fancy, running from your root chakra all the way down the hot molten lava core of the earth. This is your grounding cord. It’s indestructible. Now imagine all the icky energy that’s bothering you is leaving your body and falling down the grounding cord into the center of the earth. Watch the energy just leave your body. If you want, imagine a great big huge bowling ball of negative energy, or energy that isn’t yours, just falling away from you, leaving your body, plummeting down your grounding cord into the center of the earth, where it’s completely destroyed, burned up, dissolved, or if you want to imagine it, recycled and renewed by Mother Earth for other purposes, like when you put manure on a lawn to make the grass grow. Try not to think about manure, or how bad it smells on a lawn. Go back to seeing the energy leaving your body.

That’s a basic clairvoyant technique of grounding, in a nutshell. It really works! More on grounding next time.